


The Kid in the Back of the Room

by withasideofangst



Series: The Mechanic 'Verse [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, College, Gen, Kid Tony Stark, Not Canon Compliant, POV James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Rhodey Is a Good Bro, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 07:35:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8658190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withasideofangst/pseuds/withasideofangst
Summary: A bonus chapter for my fic, A Wrench in the Machine.
You don't need to have read aWitM to read this.
---
Unable to officially sign up for college, Tony spends his days sneaking into lecture halls instead.  It's there where he meets Rhodey and Pepper.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternate first meeting that Rhodey, Pepper, and Tony could have had, if I didn't need them to have not met before they did in aWitM.
> 
> Mostly just fun, with a small side of angst. (Wow, who would have guessed...)
> 
> You do not need to have read aWitM to read this! It's a side story that couldn't be canon to the 'verse, and so has nothing to do with the main plot.
> 
> (Edit: I added this to my Asshole Shorts series too, even though it's much less asshole-y. It's still short enough and not going to be continued, so I figured I'd add it anyway.)

The lecture hall was huge, and no one paid much attention to the kid that slipped in five minutes after the lecture started and sat in the back row.

No one also thought much of it when the results of the first hour exam were released and the highest score-- the only perfect score-- belonged to an exam that had no name on it.

Sure, there were some snickers and disbelieving glances, particularly from the girl who had previously maintained the highest scores in every class, but except for the rather exasperated professor, no one tried to look into the matter further.

After half a semester of this--

“That’s wrong,” muttered a voice in the back row.

A couple people turned around to hiss shushing noises, but only the guy directly in front of the speaker actually seemed to hear what was said.

“What?”  He whispered back, blinking when he saw that the speaker was a teenager.

“That should be phi squared,” the teenager replied, and the guy turned back around, realized he was right, and when the kid said nothing more, he raised his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Rhodes?”  The lecturer asked.

“Sir, isn’t that supposed to be phi squared?”  He repeated, and after a moment of squinting, the professor fixed the mistake and thanked him.

“You didn’t want to correct him?”  He asked, turning back towards the kid and whispering again, ignoring the glares his classmates gave him.

“Nah,” the kid replied.  “You can take all the credit,  _ Mr. Rhodes _ .”

He rolled his eyes.

“My friends call me Rhodey,” he said, extending a hand over the back of his seat, and after a moment’s thought, the kid took it.

“Call me Tony.”

\---

The semester progressed, and Rhodey soon realized that Tony was in several of his engineering classes, as well as physics, where they’d met, and the most advanced math classes.

When he asked how the kid had that much time, the kid snorted.

“I’m not officially a student here,” he replied, and suddenly Rhodey had a feeling who the nameless exam belonged to.

“Most people assume I’m some professor’s kid, and just give me the worksheets to, I don’t know, draw on while I wait.”

“You’re clearly a genius,” Rhodey remarked, “so why not apply to get in?”

Tony smiled, but it was more sharp than friendly, and there was something dark in his eyes.

“Let’s just call it parenting issues and leave it at that,” he said, and Rhodey never brought it up again.

They continued to study together, however-- if by “studying together,” one meant Tony helping Rhodey any time he got stuck, while blatantly complaining about the state of the education system and how bored he was-- and eventually, their study group widened to include a woman in her second-to-last year in business school.  Her name was Virginia, but Tony took one look at her when Rhodey brought her by after their shared mathematics course, and--

“Welcome to the club, Pepper,” Tony said, and despite the confused looks of both his study partners, the nickname stuck.

(“I never really liked Virginia anyway,” Pepper confided to Rhodey later, not that it would have stopped Tony from using the nickname.)

\---

Most of the time, Rhodey found hanging out with Tony to be fun, if a bit of a headache at times.

Then there was the time he got into a furious debate with an engineering professor, when Tony insisted that holographic projector screens were possible with current technology, only needing a few tweaks, but the considerably older professor insisted that the power required, not to mention the technology necessary to triangulate where to project things, would require far more development than anything currently on the market.

Tony left the lecture hall in a huff, only a few of his unofficial classmates snorting, clearly in agreement with the teacher.

Not even Rhodey expected Tony to come back on Monday with a finished prototype, however, which spelled “TOLD YOU SO” in giant, glowing letters which took up half the lecture hall’s stage.

On Wednesday, the next time class was held, Tony wasn’t there, however, and Rhodey never saw him in the course again.  When the professor asked where the kid had disappeared to, having seen Rhodey hanging out with him before, he could only shrug.

It took three days for Tony to appear again, and when Rhodey asked him about it, the kid just shrugged and never said anything about it.

The prototype never was seen again, either.

The only other time Rhodey saw a hint of Tony being angry with a teacher, he missed the actual argument.  He wasn’t in Tony’s artificial intelligence elective, but they’d arranged to meet outside the lecture hall to walk to lunch.

As a result, Rhodey was there in time to see Tony angrily stalk out of hall a few minutes before the end of lecture, and he spotted shocked expressions on the faces of students and the teacher before the doors swung shut.

“Want to talk about it?”  Rhodey asked, and was treated to an hour of Tony berating the professor’s views on AIs and how intelligent a computer could ever be.

“If he ever met Jarvis,” the kid muttered, and Rhodey raised an eyebrow.

“Who’s Jarvis?”  He asked.

Tony blinked, seemed to rewind what he said, and let out an angry breath.

“Oh... No one.  Just a friend who knows more about AI than that moron ever will.”

Then Pepper arrived, and Tony changed the topic to the math exam she and Rhodey both had the next week.  Tony wasn’t in the class because he was already done with its sequel, but he’d agreed to help them study, camping in the library for most of the weekend.

\---

After the AI incident, Tony seemed to give up arguing with professors, and returned to quietly sitting in the back of lectures, Rhodey usually sitting next to him, and he’d whisper remarks to the older student, who would sometimes point them out to the professor, if they were corrections the teacher was likely to take as helpful, and not insulting.

(For instance, he did  _ not _ repeat Tony’s colorful commentary on how one professor’s entire lecture was based around a theorem which contained an assumption that was, Tony said, entirely flawed, and he could prove it, too.  Rhodey believed him, but considering the professor giving the lecture was the one who’d come up with the theorem, he didn’t think that would go over well.  A week later, a paper was published under an obvious pseudonym in the school’s official academic journal, tearing apart the theorem in exacting detail, while simultaneously implying the rest of the academic community were idiots for not spotting the error sooner, and Rhodey smiled as he cut the article out of the journal and taped it up in the school library.  He saw Tony smirk at it every time they passed it.)

\---

“Tony, you’re going to be there, right?”  Pepper asked, a little under two years later.

The kid grinned, watching his two friends trying to pick what to wear under their graduation robes.

“You know technically I finished my classes last semester, right?”

Rhodey snorted.

“You were never actually signed up, anyway.  So come for moral support,” he said, unbothered.

Tony’s smile turned a bit sharklike, and both of the others rolled their eyes.

“Sure.  I’ll be sure to film  _ exactly _ when you start tearing up on stage.”

Rhodey sighed.

“No, that’s going to be my mother.  And maybe my niece,” he replied.

Tony grew slightly quieter at the mention of family, though Rhodey doubted he even noticed that he did so, and Pepper, also noticing, quickly changed the subject, talking with Rhodey about how he was going to enter the air force a week later, and she would go on to work at a prestigious, large company in downtown New York City.

Tony warmed up quickly to the change in subject, but there was still a tightness that didn’t quite leave his eyes for the rest of the evening.

The next day, although Rhodey and Pepper could both swear they saw him in the crowd as they walked across the stage, when they tried to find him afterwards, the young genius was gone without a trace.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a few more of these in mind, but if you want to suggest more, feel free to do so!


End file.
